"Million Dollar Baby" won four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director (Clint Eastwood), Best Actress (Hilary Swank), and Best Supporting Actor (Morgan Freeman). It was nominated for three additional Oscars: Best Actor (Eastwood again), Best Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay. As far as I am concerned, it is one of 2004's top three movies, the other two being "The Aviator" and "Sideways." But I would say that "Million Dollar Baby" has far and away the strongest emotional impact of the three.
"Million Dollar Baby" is set in the world of boxing, but I don't think of it as a sports film. It takes on controversial subject matter that has sparked sociopolitical commentary by various people, including Rush Limbaugh and Frank Rich. However, I won't get into that aspect of the movie here because, in my opinion, to do so would be too much of a spoiler.
The film's story centers around Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank), a young woman from a trashy family who's eking out a living as a waitress. Believing she can make a better life for herself by becoming a professional boxer, she approaches aging gym-owner Frankie Dunn (Eastwood) and persuades him to train her. The other key character is Eddie "Scrap-Iron" Dupris (Freeman), a former boxer who is given a room to live in at Frankie's gym in return for performing janitorial duties.
For me, the heart of the movie is the family-like group formed by the three main characters. Frankie and Maggie become like father and daughter, while Scrap and Frankie are closer than most brothers. I found the performances of Swank, Freeman, and Eastwood to be outstanding, and one of the movie's deepest pleasures was simply watching the scenes where these three actors talk with one another. But I believe the power of the film derives from the questions it raises about how we should live our lives.
As highly as I regard "Million Dollar Baby," there are things I don't like about it. My biggest complaint is the cartoon-like nature of some of the minor characters. The caricatured portrayal of Maggie's mother and the buffoonishness of Danger, one of the guys who hangs out at Frankie's gym, don't seem to me to mesh well with the tone of the rest of the film. In general, I would have preferred that the movie be less heavy-handed.
The screenplay for "Million Dollar Baby" was based on F. X. Toole's book "Rope Burns," the title of which was later to changed to be the same as that of the film. The book contains a collection of six short stories, but the material for the movie is drawn almost entirely from only two of them, "Million Dollar Baby" and "Frozen Water." I would describe the short story "Million Dollar Baby," which is only 40 pages long, as a fine example of hard-boiled prose.
On DVD, there are three versions of "Million Dollar Baby." Two of these are two-disc editions, identical except that one contains the feature film in widescreen, while the other has it in full-screen. Each of the two-disc editions is also available packaged with Toole's book. The third DVD version is the same as the widescreen two-disc version, except there is a third disc which is an audio CD of the film's music.
The DVD extras are the same for all versions, and I would characterize them as being skimpy and only marginally informative and/or entertaining. There is no audio commentary track, and the significant DVD bonus materials have a combined running time of under an hour. These extras are in English with French subtitles optionally available.
The longest extra is the 25-minute "James Lipton Takes on Three," a low-keyed roundtable discussion with Eastwood, Swank, and Freeman. It is moderated by Lipton, who is dean emeritus at the Actors Studio Drama School at New School University in New York, and he hosts a Bravo cable television series "Inside the Actors Studio." The talk here focuses on acting, and I found it only mildly interesting at best.
There's also the 19-minute featurette "Born to Fight," in which cast members discuss the relationship of the film to real life. The only person who fascinated me here was Netherlands-born boxer Lucia Rijker, who appears in the movie as Billie "The Blue Bear."
Finally, there's the 13-minute "The Producers' Round 15," featuring interviews with Albert S. Ruddy, Tom Rosenberg, and Paul Haggis (who also wrote the screenplay) as they take a behind-the-scenes look at the movie. The part of this I enjoyed most was the information about author F. X. Toole.
On the next page, I've listed all the details for the widescreen two-disc edition of the "Million Dollar Baby" DVD.
